


Expatriation

by auburn



Category: Alliance-Union - C. J. Cherryh, CHERRYH C. J. - Works
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, Dubious Morality, F/M, Female Protagonist, Gen, Mildly Dubious Consent, Non-Explicit Sadomasochism, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-12
Updated: 2013-12-12
Packaged: 2018-01-04 10:33:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1079970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/auburn/pseuds/auburn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three glimpses of Signy Mallory: <em>Lammermuir</em>, Russell's, <em>Frey</em>. Merchanter, stationer, Fleet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Expatriation

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Senji](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Senji/gifts).



I.  
  
New ships came and old ships changed names and others were lost and forgotten by those that didn't venture into the Deep. The cold hauler _Lammermuir_ had never been famous or fast, registered out of El Dorado before the Hinder Stars were so called, had taken on temporary crew so often there were more other names aboard than Sorensons before Pell even birthed the Beyond and Union created itself in Reseune's azi labs.  
  
 _Lammermuir_ bled out, the water in her atmosphere freezing into a crystal death shroud, after dropping into real space short of Russell's system, far out from the accepted or expected approach vectors. Station longscan caught the blurt of a lifepod emergency beacon long days later and a miner skimming the higher reaches of a gas giant went out after the pod, but lacked fuel and time to search out the drifting wreckage which tumbled past Russell's gravity well and fell forever into the black reaches outside that tiny human sphere.  
  
 _Peony_ pulled twenty-eight survivors out of the overcrowded pod, kids and junior-juniors who hadn't even been on alterday rotation yet, all of them terrified and sick after going through jump without tranq, and none of them with a clue where _Lammermuir_ had been, nor what had happened to the ship. Without access to navcomp, even Mallory, the junior who piloted _Lammermuir_ to Russell's, couldn't tell them the coordinates for the jump point where the cold freighter had dipped out of the interface. Jump had scrambled her memory of the calc she'd done to get out of there.  
  
Impressive piloting for someone who hadn't had the Sorenson name to smooth the way into a rank, closer to unbelievable than not, but Mallory still found herself alone on Russell's with little prospect of finding another berth on any merchanter ship. Mallory knew better than to speak of the crying songs she'd heard in between real space, but merchanters survived on a thin margin, ever thinner as Union pressed Earth Company and its fleet back along the lines of expansion toward Pell and the now profitless Hinder Stars between it and Sol itself, and none of them were interested in putting someone at navcomp who was unknown factor.  
  
Most of the kids were young enough they could assimilate into station culture, though. _Little Bear_ , out of Viking, took five junior-juniors, since ECS-36 _Egypt_ had impressed ten of theirs straight off the Pell docks. _Little Bear_ canceled layover and jumped for Mariner with most of its heated holds still filled with cans of biostuff out of Pell when ECS-43 _Panama_ swept into Russell's cycling its vanes to shed speed, missing a rider, and trailing atmosphere from its troop quarters. Either the Chins were nervous _Panama's_ trouble would follow to Russell's or they just didn't want to share dock with another Fleet ship.  
  
Mallory could guess, though, because Sayid Chin had blanched and bolted from the bed he'd been sharing with her when the com message played from his family's ship. Dressed and reported back without so much as a good luck wish to her. If she'd been inclined to such emotions, Mallory might have been bitter at his defection. Instead, she vowed to enjoy the accommodations he'd already paid for through the next two station days, and thought about the Fleet.  
  
Life on _Lammermuir_ was what Mallory knew. What she wanted. With the exception of knowing that bar a disaster that wiped out most of the ranking crew, rejuv meant that no matter how good she was at the pilot s station, how high her navcomp scores were, how long she stayed on the ship, she'd never be more than the back-up pilot for the alterday rotation. But she'd swallowed her frustration and been the best and held on to the determination that something had to change and when it did, she would be ready. Life aboard _Lammermuir_ might have been static, but the universe wasn't. Change had to come.  
  
Alarms cycling, section hatches sealed, cylinders still and grav gone, air thinning and moving fast enough she could feel it against the bare skin of her face hadn't been within the realms of her imagination, though. Nothing she'd hoped for in even her darkest ambitions.  
  
Clary and Dev had taken charge of getting the littles to the lifepod. Mallory had snagged Wisława and Yoyo, even though he'd never done more than work sims for evals yet, and they had worked their way to the bridge, crawling through access ways available only in freefall, terrified the entire time someone else would reassert control and restart rotation, guaranteeing them broken bones at the very best. They'd had to suit up to access the bridge, no way to seal the hole punched through _Lammermuir_ , small miracle comps were still mostly up.  
  
Yoyo tore his suit on a raw edge of something, panicked and tumbled, gone unconscious and then gone, nothing Mallory or Wisława could do while they tried to maneuver and scavenge a code key off Captain Sorenson's floating body, _Lammermuir_ still under fire from an unknown vessel heaving out of the dark at them, everything red-lined or already dead. _Lammermuir_ was unarmed and too slow to fight anything built since the war began. All they could do was run.  
  
Helpless.  
  
No time to use the drugs that made jump bearable.  
  
Wisława was at Mallory's side. Then she wasn't. Just gone, somewhere in jump, as if she'd merely walked away from her station. Or maybe Mallory had; she was on the lifepod when _Lammermuir_ fell into real space again, cutting the pod loose before the short window in which they could steer for the gravity well closed.  
  
Mallory tried not to think of it, or the jump, or whatever she'd heard. Crazy wouldn't win her any ride off Russell's, she knew that, even before she realized no one wanted a bad luck pilot with no Name to back her up. She knew she'd stay on Russell's the rest of her life before she'd jump without tranq again. Never wanted to feel that loss of control and understanding, still wasn't sure if it had been worse during jump or coming out of it with the feeling she'd lost something.  
  
She dreamed of Wisława still on the bridge, no longer in her suit, long brown hair swirling, mermaid singing.  
  
Alcohol dulled dreams. Dulled reaction times too. Too much booze would kill any any dream of getting off the station. So Mallory rationed her intake the way she rationed the tiny amount of funds station had provided her after medical's release. She wouldn't sentence herself to spending the rest of her life as a comp tech on station through her own mistakes. Nothing else she could control, not the stationers and not the merchanters. Everything but herself was out of her hands. So she stayed sharp and suffered through her dreams.  
  
 _Panama_ docked at Russell's just long enough to take on fuel and repair where it had been holed in engagement with Union's _Xanadu_.  
  
 _Kittyhawk_ came and went. _Priscilla. Dublin._ High-and-mighty Reillys. _Tibet_ , with _North Pole_ prowling the outer reaches of the system, riders deployed, until resupply and refuel were done, before the Fleet carriers switched out, and then they were gone, back into the void.  
  
Mallory remained on Russell's, funds running lower and lower.  
  
  
II.  
  
Comp tech work, especially the temp kind Mallory could get on Russell's, where she lacked security clearances to handle even half of what she had training to do, didn't pay enough to get her off Russell's. Another damn case of not being able to get what you need until you don't need it. The frustration ate at her patience.  
  
She did a lot of reading, pouring through second-hand stuff no one else wanted to waste storage on, picking it up cheap. Classics from Earth's history left her bewildered and bored, but there were always a few interesting texts. They at least offered some insight into the way Company thought, which tended to puzzle merchanters. Merchanters didn't regard time the way even stationers did; Company didn't worry about air and water and resources the way either stationers or merchanters did.  
  
They didn't value the same things any longer.  
  
Gulfs dark as the Deep expanded between Earth and its wandering children.  
  
Even the luxury stuffs Earth sent out in return for the goods that circled back to Sol along the merchant lanes were less and less relevant. Biostuffs were available from Pell and Cyteen now. The greatest scientific innovations were happening in Union or Beyond. People there didn't think the way they did on Earth.  
  
Mallory had known that Union and its engineered azi populations were alien to the rest of humanity. She hadn't realized that to those on Earth, merchanters and stationers were just as strange.  
  
Yet they were still all human, weren't they? They weren't a different species like the Downers.  
  
The ever present hum of the ventilators circulating atmosphere through the station caught her attention in conjunction with that thought. Truth be told, she likely had more of Pell or Cyteen making up her body than Earth and not even that much of them. More from the station systems beyond Fargone than anything else. Bodies were made up mostly of water after all and the water used on Russell's came from ice mined further out in the system, just like Pell and every other station. It cost too much to haul water out of a gravity well when it was free for the taking out in the asteroid belts. Rare organics and drugs were cheaper shipped from Pell or Cyteen. The oxygen her cells burned was cracked from that ice, the vats that produced the rations everyone ate used chemicals and minerals cracked from the raw materials available in-system. Every breath made all of them alien to Earth in a fashion.  
  
We are all made up of stars, one of those Earth writers had penned. But they were not all made up of Earth.  
  
Strange thoughts to entertain while she fucked a representative of Earth Company. Armin Djawadi, born on Earth, features pocked by disease that no station or merchanter child would ever be exposed to, heavy shoulders always hunched a little like the ceilings pressed down on him.  
  
She tried to enjoy it, the man pushing into her, his belly brushing against hers, coarse black hair on his arms and thighs and belly all sliding against her skin damp with sweat, heavy with muscle built by a life lived at the bottom of a gravity well, the smell of sweat and sex and some organic-based cologne that must have come from Earth itself. If she got off too it felt a little less like a transaction. He'd bought a meal of true-grow biostuffs instead of vat proteins that cost more than all but the station executives earned per chrono quarter for both of them and the bed they were on was bigger than the sleep cubby she rented, but he dug his fingers into her flesh and bit her lips until they bled, and she couldn't make herself forget how he took it all for granted: a Company man out from Sol Station itself carrying directives for station management and the Fleet.  
  
Her skin crawled when she thought about it too much. She learned not to do that, but it irritated her that she would have to spend at least half of what Djawadi would pay her for meds to fix the damage he was doing enough to show up for her tech job next rotation. He wasn't even the worst she'd been with, either, lacked the true edge of cruelty, and instead was just taking out his insecurities and frustration on her.  
  
That didn't mean she could stop him, though. Djawadi had all the power and if she did something he disliked, if she said no to what he wanted, all he had to do was whistle to bring the full power of Earth Company and the Fleet and likely station security down on her.  
  
Images of the blank-faced marines who made up Djawadi's security detail played behind her closed eyelids. No guessing which of them came from Earth or the Belt or Sol Station. They could have come off a station dock or a merchanter too. It wouldn't matter. No one came home from the Fleet: Once in, never out. That was all that was keeping Mallory from enlisting.  
  
But was it a good enough reason? She had no ship or family to mourn her for dead if she enlisted, the way the Chins had to give up on their crew members who had been impressed at Pell. Even if those kids tried to make a break for it and find their way back to the ship they had come from, never minding how travel and time dilation would have them out of synch with _Little_ _Bear_ , the Chins couldn't afford to accept them back. Those five Chins were dead to everyone who had known them. It was the only way stationer or merchanter could live with it, because they would have to turn them back to the Fleet, because the Fleet couldn't let anyone desert. Anyone caught harboring a Fleet deserter could expect no mercy from the Fleet. The punishments were draconian if the deserter was caught. If the deserter wasn't... _Poland_ had blown a hole through one of El Dorado's residential section to execute two deserters known to hiding within.  
  
If Mallory enlisted with Earth Company Fleet, she could never turn back, never let herself look back, never be the Signy Mallory she had always meant to be.  
  
 _Lammermuir's_ Mallory would be dead.  
  
But wasn't that Mallory already dead? she thought as Djawadi shuddered and finished, slumping down on her, compressing her ribcage until she had to struggle to breathe.  
  
 _Lammermuir's_ Mallory would never have been in that bed with Djawadi. Fleet's Mallory, at least, would never have to be there again.  
  
  
III.  
  
Beauty intrigued her, the transient face of it, the subjectivity that lifted a face or a form above the aesthetic appeal of symmetry and biological efficiency. It wasn't about destroying it, just... possessing the ability. She didn't need that to satisfy herself, either, she just felt relaxed when she knew she could destroy someone. Only strangers, though; she valued crewmates by other standards, counted their beauty in loyalty and reaction times, clever strategy and the ability to laugh in the face of the Deep.  
  
But sometimes she itched with a desire she couldn't satisfy with any of _Frey's_ crew. Almarshad was just a baby, though Mallory had him pegged to command a rider ship eventually himself, and the other two wouldn't play her sort of games. She couldn't let go, not even in Janz or Graff's bunks. Couldn't cut them on her sharp edges. Couldn't even let herself think about the fact she held the power to hurt them. Acknowledging it would be one step too close to acting.  
  
Layover for supplies on Mariner, water and fuel for _Norway_ , gave her the opportunity to loosen up and just take what she liked for a night or two, though. She didn't need more, didn't want to show this face to anyone who would ever be her responsibility. Didn't even want to be herself with crew off one of the other carriers, because gossip jumped faster than light too.  
  
Stationers were different. They were too scared and intent on maintaining the thin margin of neutrality between Mazian's Fleet and Union to even hear a complaint about someone like Mallory, so long as she didn't take it too far.  
  
She never did; that would be giving up control to a need and she never gave up control. She only needed to let her other side out with small things.  
  
It was almost more satisfying to only do small things anyway. Limiting herself meant Mallory had control.  
  
She bought plenty of drinks and paid well before bringing her last boy back to the roomy layover quarters she'd hired after walking through the docking umbilical onto Mariner s dock. Boy wasn't accurate; Mallory wanted her partners consenting and of age to give it, but _Norway_ moved fast and strung together jump after jump while hunting Union carriers, and the time differentials added up to her bedmate not having been born when she left Russell's for the Fleet.  
  
Idris. His name didn't matter to her, but Mallory made a point of learning it and asking questions, because knowing about him gave her that little edge. By the end of the evening, she knew enough to hurt him with careful phrases. Nothing Idris could realize was deliberate; after all, knowing she meant to cut him would ameliorate the sting.  
  
Each little flinch gave her a thrill. Mallory knew that should have shamed her, but in truth these small cruelties were dust compared to what she took part in as part of the Fleet. She had no say in those decisions, in the way the war was run, in the way the universe dictated human existence, and she could not take that out on her crew mates. She would never allow herself that.  
  
So there was Idris, smooth skin so dark his ancestry must have been among the last waves of emigration from Earth, before Earth stopped letting its best minds flee its system. Stationers were mostly rather homogenized. Standard human. Union tended toward engineered symmetry, even among its cits. Fleet briefed everyone on what to be on the look out for since the merchanters working across the borders had begun smuggling in Union spies.  
  
Idris had enough imperfections and insecurities that Mallory felt confident he didn't come from a Cyteen lab.  
  
He was good too, well worth the escort fee she'd paid up front.  
  
It just wasn't satisfying though, not until she used a move the marines had taught her for self-defense and he cried out in pain from the strain on his joints. She'd already stopped herself from finishing the move, because Idris had no training and hadn't fought back.  
  
The quick way his chest lifted as he blinked and bit back a whimper while still lying under her let Mallory know he was trying to pretend she hadn't hurt him. He was likely smart enough to know it hadn't been a premeditated action.  
  
"I paid for the night, didn't I?" Mallory remarked to him.  
  
She watched his pupils, only a shade darker than his irises, expand. He nodded. Something in her uncoiled and stretched.  
  
She returned to the rider ship loft the next night with a hangover and a bad taste in her mouth, well aware she would never see Idris again, but there would be others.  
  
But she hadn't made him bleed.  
  
She was in control.  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Beta by murron.


End file.
